


schemin' on a thing that's a mirage

by ilgaksu



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Backstory, Bisexual Lance (Voltron), M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-24
Updated: 2016-07-24
Packaged: 2018-07-26 13:06:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7575088
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here goes nothing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	schemin' on a thing that's a mirage

Lance’s _abuelita_ used to tell him stories on the porch every evening, the moths guttering around the faint buzz of the electric light. When he closes his eyes, he hears the sound of it pushing against his skull, just behind his eyes, like a painless, present headache. When he closes his eyes, he hears the light but doesn’t see it; he sees the crow’s feet forming around the wellspring of her eyes instead, poppyseed-and-belladonna dark, how the heavy blink of her eyelashes and irises seemed to swallow the night whole. He feels the weight of his sister’s head in his lap and his brother’s head snug against his collarbone, pinioned in by the generations of his family in the house he had been born in - born too early and too fast for the hospital, his mother’s blood and his first cry both on the kitchen floor. He remembers never once doubting the anchoring of his soul. He remembers watching the stars, a cold distant echo, and knowing in his blood he belonged; and he remembers being told stories.  

Then he joins the Garrison. Catching stars had seemed easier on his porch, but here goes nothing. Here goes nothing. His father told him once he had the same wandering eyes as his mother. So here goes one dumb kid with his mother’s eyes, hankering after the cold of stars in a Cuban summer.

Here goes nothing.

Here goes everything.

*

Here’s something Lance never noticed: all of his _abuelita_ ’s stories were about homecoming. A woman comes home to find her husband in bed with someone else. A woman drowns her children and they haunt her in her sleep. La Llorona weeps as she tries to fill her empty cradle with stolen fruit.

La Llorona weeps. It is never enough. Nothing can replace family.

Lance is finding it hard to sleep out here in space. He’s learning the stars run white-hot, would burn right through his palm to brand him, and the lifespan of a planet can be entirely literal. He’s learning that for all his mocking of his second sister, on her way to Mass with her wife, there’s something all the Garrison’s schematics were lacking: soul.

The Castle of Lions is not lacking. Lance is still homesick.

*

During their second training session, Shiro is patching Eric Clapton through the comm link and Lance is trying to do a triple backflip mid-air. It’s working. Mostly. It’s a work in progress.

 _You got me on my knees,_ sings Eric, sings Shiro and Pidge in a surprisingly sweet voice. How does he know Shiro’s old man music?  

Over - or under, or over - his own hollering, Lance is keeping an ear out for Keith. It’s a habit of his. Call it teamwork, call it whatever you want. It takes six weeks to break a habit and Lance had only been at the Garrison for five. He’s got unusually sharp hearing, even if he says so himself: it comes from a childhood of hide-and-seek and sneaking out in the dark through a house of siblings. So, he’s listening to Keith and his listening is good, and what he hears is Keith start laughing suddenly, brightly, a swathe of adrenaline-laugh ribboning out of his mouth.

“Fuck the Garrison!” Keith shouts, pulling out of a nosedive, two seconds on the clock before he’d be eating dust.

“Don’t swear in front of Pidge,” Shiro scolds, to which Pidge replies with a very articulate “Fuck off, Shiro.”  

Over the laughter - or under, or over - Lance is still back a few seconds ago, hooked on the catch of Keith’s voice, dragged in by the undertow of very real and very present disdain. _Fuck the Garrison._

 _Cargo pilot,_ Keith had called him. For someone who said he didn’t remember, he sure knew where to draw blood. Lance wonders what someone who’d been the Garrison darling - who’d been rubbed in Lance’s face every shot he got at the simulator - Lance just wants to know what Keith’s problem is, all right?

That’s all it is. That’s all it’s ever been.

*

“You’re bad at lying, Lance,” Aleesha says, smirking at him. It’s a year and a lifetime ago and he’s busy hiding, why is she here?

“Go away,” he says, and throws a pebble at her for good measure. It strikes her in the thigh, which he didn’t expect it to, and now he feels bad. He lets her sit down without throwing any more stones. She leans forward and tucks one strand of his hair behind one ear. He lets her.

“You should get that cut before you go,” she says. “Take after me already.” Her head is shaved and the faint light of dusk hits the gold ring in her nose, a glint like the ringing of a bell. Their father had nearly killed her over it. He still remembers the lamenting like it was yesterday. By comparison, her going to San Francisco six years later and coming back with an American wife was nothing. A wife, after all, is family. You don’t let go of family.

“I’m not going yet,” he retorts, and winds his arms tighter around his knees.

“I’ll miss you too, little bro,” she sighs. “Did I say congratulations?”

“Yeah,” he says, rolling his eyes at the memory. “A lot. You were drunk. There was a lot of crying and kissing my face.” His voice cracks and he wishes he could blame it on puberty, but it hasn’t broken for years now, so there’s that one shot.

Aleesha laughs suddenly.

“Hey, remember when you wanted to ask that girl in your English class - what was her name - and your voice went so high - you could’ve broken the glass in every window, Lance, it was beautiful -”

“Oh, Christ, will you let that go,” Lance groans, tucking his head into the circle of his arms, and then adds, “Her name was Floramaria,” because apparently he’s never known when to quit, and that’s before he jumped through a wormhole.

Cradled in his own arms, all he can see is dark; all he can smell is his own drying sweat; all he can hear is Aleesha’s laughter and the cicadas’ cry. It’s the safest confessional he’s getting anytime soon and he says, all in a rush, “I kissed Dav - my friend from the prep class.”

It’s half-muffled against his arms, so in the silence after he wonders if maybe he went unheard. He’s taking in a breath to try and get it out again when:

“You mean the prep class you kept skipping?” Aleesha says. “I didn’t know we ever got you in that room long enough to make eyes at anyone, you know.”

“We skipped it together,” Lance mutters, and won’t look at her.

“You told Mama yet?” Aleesha asks quietly, serious. He shakes his head. He doesn’t know how to say it took everything, all the space in his chest to tell her, so he keeps that one locked up too. He knows Aleesha hears it somehow. She puts her arm around his shoulder and presses a kiss to the top of his head.   

“You gonna look at me anytime soon, buddy?” she says softly, just as soon as he says, “Is it easier for girls?”

She huffs under her breath, sudden and low. He waits for her answer, raising his head, breath trembling. The cicadas sing, and Lance was born too early and too fast, and maybe that accounts for it, for him wanting too much. Later, he’ll own this; but right now he’s sixteen-going-on-seventeen, he’s leaving home for the first time next week and everything feels too open and vast, with one move wrong sending him into a tailspin.

“No,” she says, sighs it against the side of his forehead, “It isn’t. But one day, it’ll be easier.”

“You think?” His voice is doubtful.

She points to the darkening sky. He follows the cheap jangle of her bracelets and how her wrist turns into her hand, and pinpoints it all, including her mismatching silver wedding ring, in his memory.

“Dude. Next week, my little brother is training to go into space,” she says, smiling, with the voice that reminds him of childhood nights watching her watch late channel sci-fi. “Anything can happen.”

Anything can happen, he tells himself later, being told to be grateful for his bunk, being told to be thankful that he got let in ‘cause of a dropout, being told it’s better than a cargo pilot, telling _himself_ it’s better than a cargo pilot. Anything can happen.

Anything, anything, anything.  

*

He kisses Keith, and he tells himself it’s no big deal. That’s all it is. That’s all it’s ever been. Keith kisses him back, and that’s slightly more of a deal, but Lance can run with that. It’s space. They’re paladins. Space lion paladins. It’s like that late night sci-fi ramped up on steroids so surely, here more than anywhere, anything can happen.

Keith kisses him back, and keeps kissing him, his teeth set against Lance’s lip, and later they’re chilling in Lance’s bunk, which is something Lance has never pictured Keith doing. Other shit, yes. Lying there, half-asleep, hair in his eyes? No. Nope. Nada. Lance keeps running with it and says, “You hated the Garrison too, didn’t you?” and Keith goes still.

“I left,” Keith retorts, “I think that makes it obvious.”

“No, I mean,” Lance says, “So did I. I mean, not the food. Not Earth.” His chest gives a wince at thought of Cuba. “But the Garrison? Who gives one, am I right?”

“That’s not it,” Keith says, frowning. It’s not that he doesn’t care, Lance realises with a sudden wrench. It’s that Keith cares too much. That’s Keith’s thing, right? It makes sense. It makes so much sense.  Lance is overwhelmed with how much sense this makes.

“I got tired of having to be grateful,” Keith adds finally. “I got tired of having to say thank you for an opportunity that wasn’t one. I didn’t get the top rank because I was lucky. I got it because I worked for it. I got it because I got myself ahead.”

“See,” Lance says lightly, “This is why I always thought you needed to chill. Back when you didn’t remember me.”

Keith’s eyes flash.  Lance doesn’t know how to say he gets it yet. He’s seventeen-going-on-something and he’s got a lot going on right now apart from this. Did he mention the space lions? The legacy? The lightyears between him and his home?

“Trust me, you’re plenty forgettable,” Keith snaps.  

“I can work on that,” he replies.

He grins at Keith and raises his eyebrows, wiggling them until Keith pushes his face to the side with a groan.

“We all get tired of being grateful,” Lance says softly, to the bedspread. He dares to look back at Keith after a moment. His eyes are soft and surprised, and they could’ve had a moment there, it was all set up and ready, but then the alarm goes off and Lance really does have to run with it.

After all, La Llorona is a story but his _abuelita_ is still telling them somewhere out there. He’s going to make his homecoming louder than the cicadas and better than the stars, and nobody’s going to go without family.  

  
Here goes everything. Here goes nothing. Here goes -


End file.
